THE GRID
58 Gigawatts Showed Up. The Risk Didn't Leave.
NERC dropped its 2026 Summer Reliability Assessment last week. The headline was sunny. All regions can meet normal peak demand this summer. Fifty-eight gigawatts of new capacity came online since last year. Solar, batteries, gas, refurbished nukes.
Sounds great. I almost moved on.
Then I read the fine print. Three regions still face risk of shortfalls if the heat gets extreme: New England, Saskatchewan, and the Pacific Northwest. Last year, six regions were flagged. So yes, it's better. But "better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
NERC's own director said it plainly during the webinar. The improvement shouldn't be read as a sign that overall risk is falling. They added a wall of new power. But demand keeps climbing. Data centers alone drove half of all U.S. electricity demand growth last year, according to the IEA.
And the risk is shifting. It used to live in July and August. Now NERC warns about "shoulder seasons" — spring and fall — when plants go down for maintenance and heat hits early. That's a new kind of problem. It means the grid has no off-season.
Goldman Sachs projects U.S. data center power demand will jump from 31 GW in 2025 to 41 GW this year. By next year, 66 GW. That's a doubling in two years. Even after trimming for delays, Goldman still sees 11.5 GW of new data center capacity in the last three quarters of 2026 alone.
We added 58 GW of supply. The market cheered. But demand isn't sitting still. The grid got stronger this year. It just didn't get strong enough to relax.
20 Years Of Silence Is Over
The biggest financial story in America isn't trending on Twitter.
It isn't on the front page of the Journal.
There is a virtual media blackout on a massive discovery.
A 20-year task force just unlocked $500 trillion in "potato-shaped" mineral rocks.
These minerals are sitting right on the U.S. seabed.
One small company is already positioned to benefit.
They are moving before the news goes mainstream.
Once this hits mainstream coverage, the ground-floor price will be history.
On May 4, three county commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, voted to approve what may become the largest data center campus on earth. Forty thousand acres. Nine gigawatts of power — more than double what the entire state uses in a year. Backed by Kevin O'Leary. Called the Stratos Project.
Hundreds of residents packed the meeting. They booed. They screamed. They chanted "shame" at the commissioners as the vote went through.
In the first four months of 2026, 79 data center projects were rejected or restricted across the U.S. — more than the 49 blocked in all of 2025. Heatmap News reports at least $41.7 billion in projects were canceled after local pushback in Q1 alone.
A Gallup poll released May 13 found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose a data center being built near them. Nearly half said they strongly oppose it. The resistance is bipartisan.
In Maine, the legislature passed a statewide ban on large data centers. The governor vetoed it. The override vote came up short. But the fact it got that far — in a state with no major tech hub — says something about where the mood is heading.
Congress is getting involved too. The "No Harm Data Centers Act" landed in the House in March. Sanders introduced a full construction moratorium in the Senate. Neither will pass soon. But the signal is clear: data centers just became a midterm election issue.
Meanwhile, U.S. electricity rates climbed 5.4% from 2025 to 2026, per the EIA. Utilities filed $9.4 billion in rate increase requests in Q1 alone, touching 81 million customers. When voters connect rising power bills to data center expansion, the politics get ugly fast.
$20.8B in Redemption Requests. Percent Was Issuing Deals and Paying on Schedule.
Those requests came from non-traded BDC investors in Q1 2026, and most got back roughly half of what they asked for. Moody's U.S. BDC sector outlook: Negative.
On Percent's marketplace that same quarter: new issuances, scheduled payments, 0.44% lifetime net loss rate on asset-based deals since inception.† The difference is structural: concentrated corporate loans with redemption windows that close at manager discretion vs. asset-based finance with 6–24 month deal terms. 14.6% net ABS returns LTM after losses (3/31/26).† Starting at $500.
Alternative investments are speculative. No assurance can be given that investors will receive a return of their capital. †Past performance is not indicative of future results. Terms apply.
WIRED IN
Three Risks the Market Isn't Pricing
The interconnection queue is a graveyard. More than 2,060 GW of generation and storage sat in U.S. interconnection queues at the end of 2025, per Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. That's more than the country's entire installed capacity. Of projects that entered the queue between 2000 and 2019, only 13% ever reached operation. The rest got stuck or quit. Wait times for projects needing big transmission upgrades still stretch five to ten years. We keep counting planned supply that may never arrive.
The capex rate is slowing even if the total isn't. Goldman Sachs forecasts AI capex will hit $539 billion this year, up 36% from 2025. But growth drops to 17% in 2027. Analysts are warning that the pace of spending gains — the thing that lifted grid-builder stocks — is about to decelerate. More than half of 4,454 CEOs surveyed by PwC said they've seen no revenue or cost gains from AI yet. If boards start asking harder questions, the spending plans behind those 66 GW of demand could shrink fast.
Constellation's Three Mile Island filing. Constellation filed with FERC in late March warning that the restarted Three Mile Island Unit 1 — which has a long-term power agreement with Microsoft — may not be "fully deliverable" until significant transmission upgrades are completed. The reactor is ready. The wires aren't. That's the whole story of this infrastructure cycle in a single filing.
New York's grid is thinner than it looks. NYISO warned in April that summer reliability margins will be the lowest in recent history. An aging fleet plus extreme heat could push the state's grid to the edge. Most investors are watching Texas and Virginia. Few are watching the Northeast. That's usually where surprises come from.
